Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (German: Konzentrationslager...KZ or KL)
throughout the territories it controlled. The first Naziconcentration camps were erected in Germany in March 1933 immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and his Nazi Party was given control
over the police through Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Prussian Acting Interior Minister Hermann Göring.[2] Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps initially held around 45,000
prisoners.[3]

Heinrich Himmler's SS took
full control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany in 1934–35.[4] Himmler expanded the role of the camps to holding so-called "racially undesirable elements" of German society,
such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Romani.[5] The number of people in camps, which had fallen to 7,500, grew again to 21,000 by the start of World War II[6] and peaked at 715,000 in January 1945.[7]

One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright:
Lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life". The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the
"racially inferior," or "sexually deviant," as well as to "enemies of the state" both internal and external. From very early in the war, part of Nazi policy was to murder civilians en masse,
especially targeting Jews. Later in the war, this policy grew into Hitler's "final solution", the complete extermination of the Jews. It began with Einsatzgruppen death squads in the East, which killed some 1,000,000 people in numerous massacres, and continued in concentration camps where prisoners were actively denied proper food and health care. It culminated in the construction of
extermination camps -- government facilities whose entire purpose was the systematic murder and disposal of massive
numbers of people. In 1945, as advancing Allied troops began discovering these camps, they found the results of these policies: hundreds of thousands of starving and sick prisoners locked in with
thousands of dead bodies. They encountered evidence of gas chambers and high-volume crematoriums, as well as thousands of mass graves, documentation of awful medical experimentation, and much more.
The Nazis killed more than 10 million people in this manner, including 6 million Jews. (This entry is Part 18 of a weekly 20-part retrospective of World War II)

Warning: All images in this entry are shown in full, not screened out for graphic content. There are many
dead bodies. The photographs are graphic and stark. This is the reality of genocide, and of an important part of World War II and human history.

Note: I have included 12 of the 45 images from the Atlantic article below, randomly presented with death camp video.

The idea of mass extermination with the use of stationary facilities built exclusively for that purpose was a result of earlier Nazi experimentation with the
chemically manufactured poison gas during the secretive Action T4 euthanasia programme against German mentally and physically
disabled.[2] It was adapted, expanded and applied to victims from many ethnic and political groups; the Jews however were the primary
targets, accounting for over 90% of the extermination camp death toll. This genocide of the Jewish people was the Third Reich's
"Final Solution to the Jewish question".[3] The
Nazi attempts at Jewish genocide are now collectively known as the Holocaust.[4]

No aspect of the Holocaust has been studied and debated as intensively as the nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution. The program evolved
during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp." Most historians agree, wrote Christopher Browning, that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time.[4] "It is generally accepted the decision-making
process was prolonged and incremental."[5] In the first phase of the mass murder of Jews, wrote Raul Hilberg, the mobile
killers pursued their victims across occupied territories; in the second phase, affecting all of Europe, the victims were brought to the killers at the centralized extermination camps built for this purpose.[6]

The New York Times
BY ROBERT JAY LIFTON;
Published: September 21, 1986

Robert Jay Lifton is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This
article is an adaption from his book, ''The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,'' to be published next month by Basic Books.

Before Auschwitz and the other death camps, the Nazis had established a policy of direct medical killing - killing arranged within medical channels, by means of
medical decisions, and carried out by doctors and their assistants. The Nazis called this program ''euthanasia.''

''Euthanasia,'' in its Greek derivation, means ''good death.'' The word is generally used for actions taken to facilitate the deaths of those who are already dying,
and has long been a subject of debate for physicians, moral philosophers and the general public.

The Nazis, however, used the term ''euthanasia'' to camouflage mass murder. Just how the Nazis were able to do that has been made clearer by recent historical research
and by interviews I was able to conduct during the last decade with German doctors who participated in the killing project.

Nazi medicalized killing provided both the method - the gas chamber - and much of the personnel for the death camps themselves. In Auschwitz, for instance, doctors
selected prisoners for death, supervised the killings in the gas chambers and decided when the victims were dead.

Doctors, in short, played a crucial role in the Final Solution. The full significance of medically directed killing for Nazi theory and behavior cannot be comprehended
unless we understand how Nazi doctors destroyed the boundary between healing and killing.

The Nazi principle of killing as a therapeutic imperative is evident in the words of the Auschwitz S.S. doctor Fritz Klein. Klein was asked by an inmate how he could
reconcile Auschwitz's smoking chimneys with his purported fealty to the physician's Hippocratic oath, which requires the preservation of life. ''Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life,''
replied Klein. ''And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.''

THE NAZIS JUSTI-fied direct medical killing by use of the simple concept of ''life unworthy of life'' - lebensunwertes Leben. While this concept predated the Nazis, it
was carried to its ultimate racial and ''therapeutic'' extreme by them.

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the destruction of ''life unworthy of life,'' coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the
killing of ''impaired'' children in hospitals, and then the killing of ''impaired'' adults -mostly collected from mental hospitals - in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide. The same
killing centers were then used for the murders of ''impaired'' inmates of concentration camps. The final step was mass killing, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps themselves.

Once in power - Hitler took the oath of office as Chancellor of the Third Reich on Jan. 30, 1933 - the Nazi regime introduced an early sterilization law with a
declaration that Germany was in grave danger of Volkstod -''death of the people,'' ''nation'' or ''race'' - and that, to combat it, harsh and sweeping measures were imperative.

Mandatory sterilization of those termed the ''hereditarily sick'' was part of the Nazi vision of racial purification. No one knows how many people were sterilized;
reliable estimates range from 200,000 to 350,000 people.Read more

5. A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from
SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945. AP Photo

14. Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department
at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, died during World War II. Czeslawa was a Polish Catholic girl, from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland, who was sent to
Auschwitz with her mother in December of 1942. Within three months, both were dead. Photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a 2005 documentary: "She was so young
and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the
face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her
tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere. It would have been fatal for me."AP Photo/Auschwitz Museum

1. An emaciated 18-year-old Russian girl looks into the camera lens during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Dachau was the first German
concentration camp, opened in 1933. More than 200,000 people were detained between 1933 and 1945, and 31,591 deaths were declared, most from disease, malnutrition and suicide. Unlike Auschwitz,
Dachau was not explicitly an extermination camp, but conditions were so horrific that hundreds died every week. Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps
which served as temporary way stations, and killing centers built primarily or exclusively for mass murder.

EARLY CAMPS

From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were
German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. These facilities were called
"concentration camps" because those imprisoned there were physically "concentrated" in one location.Read
more.

3. German soldiers question Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began to concentrate Poland's population of over 3 million Jews
into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation, even before the Nazis began their massive deportations from the
ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe -- took place from April 19 until May 16 1943, and began
after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It ended when the poorly-armed and supplied resistance was crushed by German troops.

In the period of 1941-1945, for the first time in the history of mankind, industrial plants were used to kill people. At the genocide on the Jews, extermination camps
were established, where the Nazis in the most terrible way carried out the mass murder of 3 million Jews – half of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.

A total of six extermination camps were established with the ghoulish purpose of killing Jews one after the other. Gypsies and other groups from all over Europe were
also sent to the extermination camps.Read more

10. The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau
extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob. AP Photo/Yad Vashem Photo Archives

15. A starved Frenchman sits among the dead in a sub-camp of the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp, in Nordhausen, Germany, in April of 1945. U.S. Army
LOC

Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories Documentary

35. Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose in a concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria, on May 7, 1945. The camp was reputedly used for "scientific"
experiments. NARA/Newsmakers

Private Zinovii Tolkatchev at the Gates of Hell, Majdanek and Auschwitz Liberated: Testimony of an Artist

Chelmno was the first extermination camp that the Germans established
on Polish soil. Murder operations began there on December 8, 1941, and continued intermittently until January 1945. The Jews of the Lodz ghetto and the vicinity were the primary victims deported to
Chelmno, where they were murdered by means of gas vans. When the deportees reached the camp, they were ordered to undress, stripped of their belongings, and tricked into boarding a van whose exhaust
pipe was actually connected to its interior. After the doors were closed, the van began to drive toward a designated burial place in a nearby forest. No one survived. By using three gas vans, nearly
300,000 Jews and 5,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered in Chelmno. Only three Jews survived this death
camp.

Starting in March 1942, after the guidelines for action were worked out at the Wannsee Conference, the Germans established three extermination camps at the eastern
boundary of the Generalgouvernement, not far from main railroad lines: Belzec (established in March 1942, this camp functioned until December of that year; in the spring of 1943, the
cremation of bodies began in order to cover up the traces of the murders committed); Sobibor (May-July
1942, and October 1942-October 1943); and Treblinka (July 1942-August 1943).

The Nazis’ purpose in building these camps was to carry out the systematic murder of European Jewry as part of the Final Solution. Permanent gas chambers were
constructed in these camps. No selections were performed in these camps. As the deportation trains arrived, the victims – men, women, and children – were sent directly to the gas chambers.
Approximately 1,700,000 Jews, mostly from Poland, were murdered in these three extermination camps.

A standard method of extermination was used in these three camps: carbon monoxide from large tank engines was released into sealed chambers. The victims were stripped
of their clothing and crowded into the gas chambers where they died of suffocation within a short time. The corpses were removed by Jewish slave laborers and thrown into large pits. The corpses were
later burned in an attempt to destroy any evidence left behind. The entire process of murder took only a few hours and the camps would process and murder numerous transports in the same day.more

23. Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner Street in Gruenwald, Germany, on April 29, 1945. Many thousands of
prisoners were marched forcibly from outlying prison camps to camps deeper inside Germany as Allied forces closed in. Thousands died along the way, anyone unable to keep up was executed on the spot.
Pictured, fourth from the right, is Dimitry Gorky who was born on August 19, 1920 in Blagoslovskoe, Russia to a family of peasant farmers. During World War II Dmitry was imprisoned in Dachau for 22
months. The reason for his imprisonment is not known. Photo released by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

AP Photo/USHMM, courtesy of KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau

28. The corpse of a prisoner lies on the barbed wire fence in Leipzig-Thekla, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany. NARA

30. A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burnt body in the Thekla camp outside Leipzig, in April of 1945, after the US troops entered Leipzig April 18. On
the 18th of April, the workers of the Thekla plane factory were locked in an isolated building of the factory by the Germans and burned alive by incendiary bombs. About 300 prisoners died. Those who
managed to escape died on the barbed wire or were executed by the Hitler youth movement, according to a US captain's report. Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty

23. Liberating soldiers of Lt. General George S. Patton's 3rd Army, XX Corps, are shown at Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945.
AP Photo/U.S. Army

36. A Russian survivor, liberated by the 3rd Armored Division of the U.S. First Army, identifies a former camp guard who brutally beat prisoners on April 14, 1945, at
the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany. AP Photo

Prisoners break up clay for the brickworks at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, in 1939. Credit Photograph from Akg-Images

One night in the autumn of 1944, two Frenchwomen—Loulou Le Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a nurse—watched as a truck drove in through the main gates of
Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women. "There was a lorry," Le Porz recalled, "that suddenly arrives and it turns around and reverses towards us. And it lifts up and it tips out a whole
pile of corpses." These were the bodies of Ravensbrück inmates who had died doing slave labor in the many satellite camps, and they were now being returned for cremation. Talking, decades later, to
the historian and journalist Sarah Helm, whose new book, "Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women" (Doubleday), recounts the stories of dozens of the camp’s inmates, Le
Porz says that her reaction was simple disbelief. The sight of a truck full of dead bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with ordinary experience, that "if we recount that one day, we said to
each other, nobody would believe us." The only way to make the scene credible would be to record it: "If one day someone makes a film they must film this scene. This night. This moment."

Le Porz’s remark was prophetic. The true extent of Nazi barbarity became known to the world in part through the documentary films made by Allied forces after the
liberation of other German camps. There have been many atrocities committed before and since, yet to this day, thanks to those images, the Nazi concentration camp stands as the ultimate symbol of
evil. The very names of the camps—Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz—have the sound of a malevolent incantation. They have ceased to be ordinary place names—Buchenwald, after all, means
simply "beech wood"—and become portals to a terrible other dimension.

To write the history of such an institution, as Nikolaus Wachsmann sets out to do in another new book, "KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps" (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux), might seem impossible, like writing the history of Hell. And, certainly, both his book and Helm’s are full of the kind of details that ordinarily appear only in Dantesque visions. Helm
devotes a chapter to Ravensbrück’s Kinderzimmer, or "children’s room," where inmates who came to the camp pregnant were forced to abandon their babies; the newborns were left to die of starvation or
be eaten alive by rats. Wachsmann quotes a prisoner at Dachau who saw a transport of men afflicted by dysentery arrive at the camp: "We saw dozens . . . with excrement running out of their trousers.
Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces."

These sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond belief—we know that they were true—but they are, in some sense, beyond imagination. It is very hard, maybe
impossible, to imagine being one of those men, still less one of those infants. And such sights raise the question of why, exactly, we read about the camps. If it is merely to revel in the grotesque,
then learning about this evil is itself a species of evil, a further exploitation of the dead. If it is to exercise sympathy or pay a debt to memory, then it quickly becomes clear that the exercise
is hopeless, the debt overwhelming: there is no way to feel as much, remember as much, imagine as much as the dead justly demand. What remains as a justification is the future: the determination
never again to allow something like the Nazi camps to exist. Read more

Every nation has a creation myth, or origin myth, which is the story people are taught of how the nation came into being. Ours says the United States began with
Columbus's so-called "discovery" of America, continued with settlement by brave Pilgrims, won its independence from England with the American Revolution, and then expanded westward until it became
the enormous, rich country you see today.

That is the origin myth. It omits three key facts about the birth and growth of the United States as a nation. Those facts demonstrate that White Supremacy is
fundamental to the existence of this country.Read

On the dayBennie Coleman lost his house, the day armed U.S. marshals came to his door and ordered him off the property, he slumped in a folding chair across the street and watched the vestiges of his 76 years hauled to
the curb...because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax
bill.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft Talks To Carl HiaasenIn a little less than a
century, the state of Florida has been transformed from a largely uninhabited swamp to the fourth-largest state in the union. And no one has written about that transformation more successfully than
Carl Hiaasen.

Carl Hiaasen on Florida:

"The Sunshine State is a paradise of scandals teeming with drifters, deadbeats, and misfits drawn here by some dark primordial
calling like demented trout. And you'd be surprised how many of them decide to run for public office."

In 1902, 140,000 miners went on strike, wanting higher pay, shorter work hours, and better housing.....Roosevelt...use[d] the military to run the mines in the "public
interest". The mining companies...accepted the demands of the UMW...more﻿﻿

Presidential Library and Museum

Pro labor: Labor is prior to, and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first
existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much higher consideration.Abraham
Lincoln pro labor quote﻿

Todayeconomic slaveryhas many people indebt chains. Economic or debt slavery ismore efficientfor its masters than the slavery of the Old South. Debt slaves must
feed, house and clothe themselves. Thedebt slave masters, thebanks,credit card companies, and even student loan providers, all rely upon the courts and justice system for enforcement of debt. When economic slaves can’t pay back their debt, they are told to get a second job. Or a third job.

Meanwhile, when thewell-connected mastersof economic slaves get in a financial bind, and
bring our economy to the brink of collapse, they call on politicians in Washington, DC for bailouts.Bankers don’t get second
or third jobs, they get million-dollar bonuses.

Theeconomic slave mastershave access to the best lawyers, sympathetic judges, and sheriff’s
deputies ready to haul the debt slave to court, or throw him and his family out of their
home and into the street. Does anyone see a problem with thisscenario? Where is the John Brown for today’sdebt slaves?﻿

The State Department's top spokesman resigned Sunday, three days after criticizing the Pentagon for its treatment of [Manning]...P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of State for public affairs, told a group at [MIT]...that the Pentagon's treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning was "ridiculous and stupid and
counterproductive." His comments were made public by a blogger who attended the session.More here, and Politico, andThe Washington
Post

FORTY years ago today, The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a seminal moment not only for freedom of the press but also for the role of
whistle-blowers — like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the papers to expose the mishandling of the war in Vietnam — in defending our democracy.Read more﻿﻿

Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in
Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.Read
more﻿

"I really don't like the term 'PTSD,’” Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Shay told PBS' "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" in 2010. "He says the diagnostic
definition of "post-traumatic stress disorder" is a fine description of certain instinctual survival skills that persist into everyday life after a person has been in mortal danger — but the
definition doesn't address the entirety of a person's injury after the trauma of war. "I view the persistence into civilian life after battle," he says, "... as the simple or primary
injury." Dr. Shay on YouTube

Dr. Shay has his own name for the thing the clinical definition of PTSD leaves out. He calls it "moral injury" — and the term is catching on with both the VA and the
Department of Defense.

Moral injury, Dr. Shay says, can happen when "there is a betrayal of what's right by someone who holds legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation."read more

The Marine Corps, the most male of the armed services, is taking its first steps toward integrating women into war-fighting units, starting with its infantry officer
school at Quantico, Va., and ground combat battalions that had once been closed to women.

Stars and Stripes exists to provide independent news and information to the U.S. military community, comprised
of active-duty, DoD civilians, contractors, and their families. Unique among the many Department of Defense authorized news outlets, only Stars and Stripes is guaranteed First Amendment privileges
that are subject to Congressional oversight.﻿ Go to the website

Our motto: "FIGHTING FOR THE TRUTH. . .EXPOSING THE CORRUPT" is our battle cry! We go after, not only pompous brasshats and as COL. David Hackworth so ably put it -
the "perfumed princes" like Gen. Wesley Clark - but Gestapo-like MP's, CID, NIS, OIS and other alphabet agency "bully boys" who ignore the Constitution of the United States and the right to Due
Process.﻿

Major Heather Penney recounts the drama in the skies after District of Columbia Air National Guard pilots scrambled to intercept incoming hostile planes. She
describes why F-16’s initially took off from Andrews Air Force Base unarmed – and what she was prepared to do to bring down a plane piloted by terrorists. And she recounts how later that day she
helped escort President Bush and Air Force One back to Andrews Air Force Base.﻿ C-Span
Interview

Information on this website is a free public service. While the information on this site deals with legal issues, it does not constitute
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situation.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of the law and our reliance on information provided by outside sources, this website does not warranty or guarantee the accuracy or
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In no event will this website be held liable to any party for any damages arising in any way out of the availability, use, reliance on or inability to use this website
or any information provided by or through this website, or for any claim attributable to errors, omissions or other inaccuracies in, or destructive properties of any information provided by or
through, this website.

Neil J. Gillespie:
1. Does not give legal advice.2. Not a lawyer.3. Not an attorney.4. Not licensed to practice law.5. Did not go to law school.

______________________

Seven Year Anniversary - YouSue.org to NoSue.org

Seven years ago I started the Justice Network with the domain name YouSue.org. This name was chosen in the spirit of YouTube, the video-sharing website that
empowered ordinary people to produce and share video.

Through this website I have met folks from all over the country. Some of their stories are profiled here. Many have reached the conclusion that America’s justice system is broken.

The official Justice Network Internet address is now NoSue.org. This reflects the sad truth that for most Americans the justice system is broken, just a parody of justice. Reform American courts or
avoid them. Your life, health and wealth is at risk. But don’t just take my word, listen to the experts on this site.

The stories, images, and videos on this website are in the public
domain, or featured here under the fair use doctrine if copyrighted. I claim no credit for images posted on this site unless noted. If there is an image on this site that belongs to you and do not wish for it appear, E-mail with a link to the image and it will be removed.